The Truman show: with the first collection of his letters, a complete volume of his short stories, and a fresh edition of his first novel, Truman Capote is hot again.

"I would appreciate it if in the future you would address me as Truman Capote, as everyone knows me by that name," writes the future author to his father, Arch Persons, in 1936. It would be another 12 years before that "everyone" would be literal rather than merely virtual. But already file man who would come to enjoy unprecedented literary success with In Cold Blood, only to face unprecedented personal failure in its wake, understood that the name of his stepfather, Joe Capote, was far more suitable to him than his biological father's in getting him where he wanted to go. Consequently it's most fitting that this is the very first letter anthologized in Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote (Random House, $27.95), edited by Capote biographer Gerald Clarke.

Covering a period that goes all the way up until two years prior to his death in 1984, this volume of epistolary jottings by the man who came to supplant F. Scott Fitzgerald in the popular imagination as the embodiment of the "famous writer, his rise and fall" is full of the waspish humor that was Capote's stock-in-trade. Noting a literary critic's disapproval of the same-sex--oriented, he writes, "If Diana [Trilling] really wants to know why this 'alarming' increase in dickey-lickers, all she has to do is sit down and take a square look at herself in the mirror." More sweetly, he says of novelist Katherine Anne Porter, "She must be about sixty, but oh can she do the hootchy-cootchy." But then Capote's a fine one to talk, especially when he says of James Baldwin, "He is a mysterious mixture of real talent and real fraud." Talk about projecting!

Scarcely comparable to the lengthy missives writers such as Proust, Gide, and Mann left as a bonus legacy for their readers, the letters in Too Brief a Treat nevertheless offer Capote acolytes a compendium of snappy remarks and several details of more serious interest. For example, he was quite enthusiastic about the short stories Patricia Highsmith wrote before Strangers on a Train put her on the map. Yet for all his insight and seeming erudition, Capote confesses to former lover and mentor Newton Arvin that he's "stumped" over what to say about T.S. Eliot, about whom he's been asked to write for a book of Richard Avedon photographs.

Arvin, a respected scholar of Melville and Hawthorne, was ruined in 1960 when an "antismut" campaign spurred his arrest for possession of the sort of homoerotic photographs that today are used to sell pricey ready-to-wear from Abercrombie & Fitch. Capote, by contrast, got away with gay outrageousness--from his baroque 1948 coming-of-age tale, Other Voices, Other Rooms (just reissued by the Modern Library, with an introduction by John Berendt, $19.95), right through to his disco shenanigans at Studio 54. What did Capote in was indiscretion of another sort: His society pals proved unamused by the portrait he painted of them in "La Cote Basque, 1965," an excerpt from his legendarily unfinished epic, Answered Prayers.

Capote was fascinated by the criminal mind, yet Highsmith, who proved far more adept at exposing its psychology than Capote, was never regarded by him as the literary model that Proust was. Nevertheless, in attempting Answered Prayers, Capote overlooked the fact that the fin de siecle social observer was writing about a world that was safely dead--not alive and kicking. Moreover, the "kick" in "La Cote Basque, 1965" didn't come from the dirt Capote dug but from his ability to create perfectly formed short stories.

"La Cote" isn't in Random House's new collection The Complete Stories of Truman Capote ($24.95, with an introduction by Reynolds Price). But when you've read "Children on Their Birthdays," you'll know that "the tiny terror" had real talent after all.

Ehrenstein is the author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-2000.